> The world’s financial systems are increasingly unable to meet the demands of consumers and businesses.
I would love to learn more about this. Precisely what needs are the world's financial systems unable to meet?
I would love to learn more about this. Precisely what needs are the world's financial systems unable to meet?
This may be good regulation and necessary, but it makes it very difficult for consumers to do simple things like transferring money and setup accounts. Especially for lower income people who tend to have difficulty getting together all the required identification and documentation.
And it seems that any "innovation" in this regard will be companies attempting to skirt these regulations, only to be eventually reined in when they get popular enough to be used for fraud or other nefarious purposes.
That's what's so discouraging about a lot of these issues. They're hacks around political apathy, the chances of success are low (to this day I still use the Standard Treasury and BankSimple outcomes as what happens when you go up against the banking industry).
Why YC doesn't stop skirting the issue and align with political representatives and parties that are congruent with the values they're attempting to push through funding is beyond me. They've already chosen a side (looking for solutions for climate change, animal welfare, support of the arts/creators, sustainable use of planetary resources), embrace it fully. If YC wants to create a legacy, they should aim to obsolete themselves by working towards public policy that removes the risk inherant with becoming an entrepreneur (funding, health insurance, derisking opportunity cost, etc).
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=usps+banking+services
[1a] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-...
Full disclosure: I work for a financial utility in risk management.
Let's say you manage to make your way through all of that. Or at least you get close enough that you can actually pass legislation. But you can't get the legislation all the way through without making some small compromises, at which point your elected officials are going to be branded as "neoliberal sellouts" and primaried by extremists. Then you have to start all over again.
That's something that you can try and do. That's also something that literally everyone else tries and does all the time, and at least half of those everyone else are working directly against you.
Or you could solve the problem through some other mechanism. That seems hard, but solving the problem through American politics is really hard, probably harder in a lot of cases. What happened first: did political activists literally lobby local governments to drop taxicab medallions, or did startups circumvent that problem by introducing ridesharing?
We can appreciate the inroads Uber and Lyft have made in disrupting transportation networks that will last well after they've both exhausted their runways, but a sustainable system will need to exist in the future that does not rely on VCs burning piles of capital in dumpsters.
Walmart is basically the banking service for the unbanked. Between Bluebird, check cashing, and bill paying, you got a lot of bank functions.
What Walmart giveth, Walmart can taketh away at any time.
To your anecdote, would you not trust the US Health and Human Services to deliver national healthcare if the team behind Watsi was in charge? Because that is quite literally what they're doing; building a transparent [1] and ruthlessly efficient [2] healthcare management system for third world citizens. Cleary, YC believes they can do it [3]. I also believe it can be done.
[1] https://usenotion.com/watsi/transparency/
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/07/y-combinator-and-watsi-la...
[3] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-research-universal-healthcar...
The Native Americans who need our help, and do not receive it from the government IHS, do not have any way of democratically bringing about a more efficient team to run their health services.
The ONLY solution therefore must be a private one.
It's accountable to elected officials in Congress and the White House, OTOH, those elected officials are not in any meaningful sense accountable to the population served by IHS.
> The ONLY solution therefore must be a private one.
The structural problems with IHS incentives and accountability don't mean that there is a better private solution, and private services to Native American communities often are poor, too, because private industry isn't really all that interested in solving problems for people that have very little money to pay for the solution.
They are vanishingly unlikely to budge for your pet technocratic issue. Doing surgeries correctly is not, in any meaningful sense, up for a vote, nor is anyone going to win elected office on a doing-surgeries-correctly platform.
The irony of such levels of defeatism in a forum that proclaims opportunity is at every turn is astounding. Hope is not a strategy, but chances of success are not zero.
> Everyone gets a vote.
Yes, but its a majority game. Heck, look at all the diversity news on HN or the diversity reports by tech giants. See any mention of enrolled members of Native American tribes? See any VC funding to solve the smaller problem (might have been a nice place to test all that basic income stuff)? Heck, Google can block one of the tribal community colleges in Google Voice and no one gives a solitary damn.
No, government is less accountable than any private group. After all, they can get away with doing things like this when questioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcgGoAcDXvQ&feature=youtu.be
Not anymore. I guarantee you that any private company that would try to provide those services would have a "you can't join a class action; you have to go through arbitration" clause.
The loss comes from having to serve literally the entire country by law. A postal service in cities is profitable - a postal service that has to serve even the remotest ditch in the deepest desert of a flyover state with daily mail will always incur loss. And that is what society is for: to bear the cost of providing everyone in the country with affordable mail.
To add banking services to the unbanked (or those who do not trust the megabanks any more, given their historic lack of customer support and historically low image) is something that can very well be used to offset these losses.
https://www.21cpw.com/paea-the-most-insane-law-by-congress-e...
Providing basic banking services at a post office is not nearly as big a proposition as delivering mail to every address in the country.
Plus banking services are touched less frequently than mail. I get junk mail every day. I don't know the exact logistics of what they're suggesting, but I have a hard time seeing how it could be as expensive as mail delivery.
(I have a vague idea that this may be a politically loaded question, so I just want to put this disclaimer here to say that I genuinely don't mean for it to be. I don't know much about the past of the USPS and why it is the way it is, so i'm asking)
I think it's less a philosophical question -- is mail like roads or police? -- vs a matter of efficiency. It's obviously possible to NOT lose money delivering much more difficult things than paper. FedEx and UPS do it all the time. But they're private businesses who compete with each other (and Amazon and whoever else), so they have to figure it out or they won't be around.
The USPS, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete with anyone (in fact, it's illegal for anyone else to deliver mail) and has no incentive or need to be efficient because they can draw on the US Treasury whenever they need to. It's not that they're bad people, it's just the nature of the incentives and system involved (and also it's run by congress). These same dynamic would be there in banking though, which is why this seems like such a bad idea.
Do you make people hard to deliver to have to pay more, or do you "average" out the cost and make everyone pay roughly the same amount?
With a combination of taxes, flat-rate fees, and delivery-distance based costs, I think it's more than possible to make a system where it's not "free" or extremely cheap to send somewhere hard-to-get, but it's also not prohibitively expensive.
And IMO the postal service is riding that line in a way that i'm happy with. I appreciate that I can send a small box across the country for $5, and I can do that whether I live in NYC or in middle-of-nowhere pennsylvania. And I'm more than happy to pay a bit more in taxes to make up for the difference that the flat-rate doesn't cover if it means that lower-income individuals won't need to pay as much to send mail at all.
I know that there are problems with not having competition, but I think mail delivery is along the same lines as other "naturally monopolistic" things like power, water, sewer, etc...
Yes, "state sanctioned monopolies" can be a problem, and they have their downsides, but I believe for natural monopolies they are the best solution.
They also do not have the requirements to serve the entire country, and they do not have the bonkers pension requirements placed on them like the USPS does.
"The USPS, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete with anyone (in fact, it's illegal for anyone else to deliver mail) and has no incentive or need to be efficient because they can draw on the US Treasury whenever they need to. It's not that they're bad people, it's just the nature of the incentives and system involved (and also it's run by congress). These same dynamic would be there in banking though, which is why this seems like such a bad idea."
Money is far from being the sole motivator.
Because it's obviously a service of value, and profitability is what tells you that the net value created is positive. If you're spending more on delivering mail than people are willing to pay, you're squandering resources that could be better put to other uses.
> Why isn't mail (and possibly other services that the USPS could provide) treated like road maintenance or police or whatever else?
It should be; all of these are also services that have value, and should be held to the standard of profitability to ensure that the net value created is positive.
You've just guaranteed that no roads would ever be worked on in poor residential areas.
Why not? I said net value created. That doesn't mean each individual road has to show a profit. It means the enterprise as a whole has to show a profit. If improving roads to poor residential areas gives those people more options so they can create wealth and not be poor any more, that's a profit.
The USPS spent $2.7B more than it gained in revenue from sales of stamps etc. The idea that a government agency is supposed to be profitable, and the use of the business term "lost" is appropriate, is a politicized, partisan one. (The extent to which the USA's post isn't really a government agency any more is also extremely politicized and partisan.)
One way to tell that the profitability model isn't appropriate is, what would happen if the USPS did achieve profitability? The USPS's own press release attributes $1.1B of their "loss" to a refusal by regulators to let stamp prices remain at 49 cents, requiring them to go back to 47 cents. How is a "company" that already has extremely below-market prices and can't even get regulators to permit them to keep a 2-cent increase supposed to maintain profitability, should they ever achieve it?
Not complaining, but the fact I'm getting hammered by downvotes on all of these responses is mind boggling to me. I'm surprised how much of the tech world apparently thinks this is a good idea.
The USPS spent $2.7B more than it gained in revenue from taxes.
In analyzing USPS financials, bear in mind that they have to pre-fund all of their potential long-term pension and healthcare liabilities[0], unlike other arms of government.
ridiculous things like ePacket: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...
combined with lack of control over their business model and having to meet requirements that other businesses don't: https://blog.boomerangapp.com/2016/10/whats-killing-the-post...
I think Transferwise now allows you to sign up for a borderless account that has UK-local bank details.
You have more than enough documentation.
Money (which is the root of finance) is incredibly strong stimulus for humans that evokes all kinds of human vices. Sooner or later, anything that deals with finance and mine will come down to the questions of human nature and morale. And these are tough matters to deal with.
https://medium.com/@emilefugulin/money-tips-for-foreigners-w...